Free Republic

The presidential contest is not simply an election about who rules America; it is also an election about which set of principles defines American politics. For the past two and a half decades, conservatism has set the agenda. Is the left making a comeback? I don't think so. Notice that Democrats avoid terms like "the left" and even "liberalism" like the plague, while Republicans routinely associate themselves with the "right" and the "conservative" label. Also the left is now defined by shrieking demagogues like Michael Moore, while intelligent people are keeping their distance or moving out of this menagerie. In...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Richard Mgrdechian, the author of the new book, How The Left Was Won: An In-Depth Analysis of the Tools and Methodologies Used by Liberals to Undermine Society and Disrupt the Social Order. Preview Image FP: Richard Mgrdechian, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Mgrdechian: Thanks for having me. FP: So what led you to write this book? Mgrdechian: Over the past several years, I’ve grown more and more concerned by what I saw happening within American society in terms of the increasing levels of divisiveness and the subtle, but undeniably destructive effects that liberal policies were having...

You are a damn elite, not me! That sums up the current political debate—whether we look at charges that John McCain has so many houses he can’t remember any longer the actual number of them; or that poor Barack Obama is depressed at the soaring price of arugula; or that Fightin’ Joe Biden once bootstrapped himself up at ten in Scranton; or that moose-hunting Sarah snowmachines as naturally as Barack Obama trips over himself in a bowling lane.A nation of wood-cuttersIn short, we remain log-cabin America, formed as the frontier antithesis of Europe. Apparently, we are determined, at least in...

Obama seems happier these days. It is almost as if the disembodied spirit of his mentor, Saul Alinsky, is watching and smiling. Americans are suffering. Losses in the stock market, panic in the financial market, pain at the gas pump and in the grocery -- all these miseries of average Americans are a delicious narcotic to socialists like Barack Obama. What was the historic maxim of the Left? "The worse, the better." Alinsky said that if there was an afterlife, "I will unreservedly choose to go to hell." This is the man whose mind guides Obama's thoughts. Americans ought to...

Atlantic Monthly runs an article on John McCain. A photographer, Jill Greenberg, takes pictures of McCain for the piece. She deliberately takes awful photographs, using her skill as a professional to make the senator look as offensive as possible. Charlie Gibson, given the chance to help Americans to get to know the most interesting political figure in decades, uses that opportunity to score cheap political points to demean her instead. These are two perfect examples of the Leftist bias of the media. But what is it, really, that offends us so much about this bias? There is nothing wrong with...

In this year of historic firsts, it should surprise no one that political prognosticators predict Election Day turnout to exceed 60 percent of the voting age population for the first time in 40 years.  Americans have “change” on their minds.  But they’re getting decidedly different visions of it from two presidential candidates who stand diametrically opposed on almost every issue.  Despite the stakes, there remain some conservatives who see little reason to exercise that which Samuel Adams called one of the most solemn trusts in human society -- the right to vote.  So, with voter registration deadlines looming, let me...

At Wichita State recently, a college debate coach dropped his trousers after a foul-mouthed argument with the opposing coach in a debating tournament. YouTube shows it for the world to see.  Coach William Shanahan, who sports a caveman beard reaching below his belt, said later that, yes, his reasoning might seem "convoluted," but his trouser-dropping act was intended a sign of respect for the opposing coach.  ""Obviously it got out of control, but to be honest I thought I was in a safe house," Shanahan said. "I thought I was part of a community that handled its problems internally and...

Former Democrat national chairman Don Fowler admitted to ABC News that he rejoiced at the prospect of Hurricane Gustav hitting New Orleans during the Republican National Convention. "The hurricane's going to hit New Orleans about the time they (the GOP) start. The timing is -- at least it appears now that it'll be there Monday. That just demonstrates that God's on our side. [Laughter] Everything's cool."  In customary Leftist fashion, Fowler half-way apologized when he was caught on tape. "If this offended anybody, I personally apologize," Fowler told ABC News. "It was a mistake, and it was a satirical statement...

In the least credible and most vicious corner of the internet, liberal bloggers at the Daily Kos are accusing John McCain of plagiarizing from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The story Solzhenitsyn told was of a prisoner who drew a cross in the dirt in a Soviet Gulag. McCain's story is of a guard who drew a cross in the dirt in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. The only similarity between the two stories is a cross in the dirt, but it is hardly an unlikely coincidence that there were practicing Christians in both Russia and Vietnam, or that in the prisons...

For many on the left, WE are the aggresors in Georgia Where you stand on Georgia says a lot.By Christopher Cook First, consider the presidential candidates.McCain has taken a strong stand against Russia's crushing of a sovereign nation. Obama, not so much.Of course, as is to be expected, America turns to Republicans whenever they notice anything serious going on in the world, and that can be seen in the poll numbers: people by far prefer McCain on the Georgia matter. Then we have the left vs. the right.People on the right, generally, believe that a free nation and a free...

A note from Radarsite: Why do so many Jews vote Democratic? Recently, in response to Gary Fouse's explosive reports on antisemitism at UC Irvine, and some other related articles, this question came up. And it is a good one. Why are so many American Jews so avowedly left-wing, even at the expense of supporting Israel? How can this be? How can American Jews align themselves with the pro-Arab, anti-Israel, Muslim-appeasing left? How could American Jews be so heavily involved in anti-American organizations like the outrageous ACLU? How did this happen? While I certainly do not pretend to have any...

Return to the Article July 15, 2008Memory and the LeftBy J.R. Dunn It's difficult to avoid exasperation over the left's absolute refusal to acknowledge the new realities of the Iraq war. The surge, the Anbar awakening, the collapse of the militias (particularly that belonging to everybody's favorite would-be caliph, Moqtada al-Sadr) -- it's as if none of it ever happened, as if one the most impressive turnabouts in modern military annals never took place. The left, including its Democratic political wing and placeholders in the media, continue on with the same defeatist drone that we've heard since 2003, concentrating...

Reason #467 why the left must be destroyed... ...Their—and Obama's—love for Margaret Sanger No, I don't mean the people of the left must be destroyed. The people must be rescued from their adherence to this sickness. It's the ideology itself that must be wiped out. Check this out: Most of us know that Margaret Sanger was a disgusting person. She was a eugenicist that made Hitler proud. She wanted to eliminate undesirables from the population. What kind of undesirables? Oh, you know—criminals...the mentally handicapped...Italians—you know: undesirables. She wanted either to exterminate "the negro" or at very least slow the growth...

[Click through to article to view interview with author James Piereson.] The central thesis of James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution was that JFK's assassination was the key moment that caused a large portion of once sensible liberals to begin to tilt to the far, far left, and for lack of better word, become Unhinged. Like this calm, rational fan of the New Frontier! In the (admittedly totally tasteless) formulation of a friend of mine, the best thing that ever happened to civil rights in this country was the bullet through JFK's head. Along the way, as I wrote...

For eight years, every Democrat bitterly defended the Clintons against their critics, often using outrageous arguments and smearing the character of anyone who dared to dissent. Today, with their double-cross of the Clintons complete, the Left reminds us of their penchant for dishonesty, self-absorption, and disloyalty, as well as of their truly outsized appetite for the politics of hatred.

If you thought we hit bottom when Kos went after McCain's teeth, another popular liberal blog has picked up the shovel and is going after McCain's war injuries: First off, I find it fascinating that John McCain, who is refusing to vote for the GI Bill for our troops because "it's too generous," is himself getting $58,000 a year, tax-free, from the US government for his military service. Had McCain been getting that amount every year since Vietnam, that would total $2,000,000 for the man who isn't into overgenerous government. I just find that interesting. His staff responded with the...

In an election year such as this, the responsible voter must assess the "glorious" ends of the Left's various offers of a life without edges: an existence free of the normal dangers, struggles, and consequences of life. For example, when the candidates on the Left tout universal healthcare as an end, the voting public should recognize that the means to that end will be higher taxes with less medical choices for all patients, as well lower pay and less treatment options for doctors. It should be evident that universal healthcare will ultimately be disastrous instead of beneficial, crippling instead of...

Who says San Francisco doesn't honor veterans? Last weekend, the city, which voted in 2005 to ban military recruiters from public high schools and colleges, unveiled a memorial to fighting men and women in uniform. The uniforms they donned, however, were not those familiar to American soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines. The city honored American Communists and their fellow travelers who fought in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. The $400,000 monument, donated from private funds but hosted on public land, extends 40-feet long and eight feet high. Media accounts of the tribute uniformly noted that members of...

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are -- to put it mildly -- racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women's bodies. The Nation is this nation's oldest and largest-circulation leftwing journal (outside of The New York Times, of course). Joyce's screed, "Missing: The 'Right' Babies," will appear in the March 3 print edition, but is currently available online. Joyce believes -- with the faith of one immune to facts and logic...

Before and after President George W. Bush’s final State of the Union address, his critics hammered away at his record. For instance, in their “pre-buttal,” delivered some four days before Monday’s State of the Union, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took turns attacking Bush’s foreign policy, counterterrorism strategies, foreign-aid programs, education reforms and healthcare initiatives. Then, in her response to Bush’s address, Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas declared, “The last five years have cost us dearly—in lives lost; in thousands of wounded warriors whose futures may never be the same; in challenges not met here...

Even the world's most repressive regimes often have laws on the books that pretend to grant citizens certain political rights. What matters is the extent to which citizens are actually allowed to use those rights — you know, in real life. In Michigan, taxpayers are now trying to recall ten state legislators, and in the process testing how "real life" their democratic rights are. The ten targeted solons come from both parties. Prior to their fateful votes to raise taxes against their constituent wishes, taxpayer groups repeatedly warned them that a recall effort would be launched against them if they...

When Benazir Bhutto announced her return to Pakistan, Al Qaeda and their Islamic allies repeatedly promised to kill her. Shortly after her arrival, the terrorists wrapped a baby in explosives and tried to hand it to her. They killed many, but failed in their objective.More recently, they strapped bombs to a 15-year-old boy, but that too failed. But today they gunned her down and for no apparent reason other than nihilism, they set off a bomb to kill many more in the crowd.But despite the terrorists many warnings and attempts, many on the Left have decided (shock of shocks) to...

Why do PhDs in academia tend to be politically liberal? A paragraph in Science magazine’s feature “Random Samples” on December 21 suggested a reason: conservatives value other goals, like going into business to make money, or choosing to stay home and raise a family... ... It appears that conservatives are the fittest, working hard to pass on their genes, while liberals are like parasites, advancing primarily by taking over the host (the classroom) and churning out clones to infect other cells. A university setting is a contrived, unnatural environment where the parasites thrive. In the open air of true academic...

Back in January of 2006, I wrote an article titled Democrats are more violent. In fact, there's no comparison. Well, the point just keeps getting reinforced, over and over.The latest is left-wing talk radio host Mike Malloy. It was only a threat, of course, but it was a disgusting, gory threat against Matt Drudge. It was the kind of threat you just don't seem to hear from conservatives. It is the kind of threat that, were a conservative to have delivered it...a) other conservatives would have denounced it—something the left has not done with Malloyb) that conservative would probably subsequently...

...........Through this powerful medium, and with the help of its hegemony in the areas of entertainment and academia, the left maintains a constant flow of propaganda directed at every living person.Using lies, distortions, hysteria, a host of fibrication™ techniques, and inculcations both subtle and gross, the left's constant firehose of propaganda, agitprop, and permatantrum™ constantly tests—and occasionally overpowers—the common sense of our peoples.THAT is what happened in Australia...and what is looming for us in 2008.And those are just the short term, cycle-to-cycle effects. In the long run, the left is actually eroding western civilization's very sense of itself, putting at...

As movie-goers, theatre owners and studio shareholders endure yet another wave of anti-American box office duds like Rendition and Lions for Lambs it is worth remembering that left wing propaganda has real roots in Hollywood. And thanks to the character of our media and cultural establishment, we rarely get to hear about them. One of the big disappointments concerning domestic communism is that we'll never hear the full story from their end. The losing side ordinarily has plenty to say once the dust settles -- what went wrong, who was to blame, how they could have done better. But not the...

John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, penned an article on Wednesday in which he describes the global warming hysteria as "the greatest scam in history." That the left---who are mainly behind this hysteria---would seek to... • create doomsday fear,• increase government power at the expense of free people and commerce,• enrich and support scientists who espouse the left's agenda, and use intellectual pogroms to hound their...

During the week of October 22-26, David Horowitz and his Freedom Center held a series of events at 100 campuses for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, intended to counter standard academic nitwitery about the war on terrorism ("America is evil," "We brought it on ourselves," "9/11 was a Republican conspiracy"). Admirable though this was, attention must be called to an even more imminent threat. By the authority vested in me (by myself), I hereby designate the week of November 5th Left-Fascism Awareness Week -- a time to consider the clear and present danger to free speech emanating from the left, from academic...

A newly formed political action committee is aiming to stop Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary by calling into question her progressive credentials. "We think there are other Democratic presidential candidates who are both more progressive and have a better chance of beating the Republicans than she does," said the president of Democratic Courage, Glenn Hurowitz. He declined to tip his hand on the group's case against Clinton, but said the PAC plans a paid media campaign in the early primary states to make its position clear. "We’ll definitely have sufficient resources to make a significant media buy," he said,...

October 09, 2007 The evidence for NeocommunismBy James Lewis There is a compelling factual case to be made that the contemporary radical Left can properly be called "Neocommunist." The Hard Left is grounded in Marxist vision of creating a "new man" under a system led by a vanguard that knows best what the rest of society needs. And Neocommies behave in patterns with startling parallels to Old Communist tactics. The Neocommies are not members of a Communist Party, and are part more of a movement than a conspiracy. They are utterly different from traditional liberalism in America and Europe. Traditional...

Liberals: A Puzzlement By Burt Prelutsky I'll come right out and admit that I understand Islamic terrorists far better than I do American liberals. After all, once you realize that young Muslims are taught by their religious leaders that our nation is militarily powerful and technologically advanced because we cut a deal with Satan, you can see where they'd be upset with us. But what is the deal with liberals? How to explain their mushy heads? Was it something weird in their baby formula? Were they potty-trained when they were too young or, more likely, too old? Or is it...

Has the left no remaining ounce of shame? Its latest target: the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, whom Senate Democrats unanimously confirmed. Remember Democrats faulting President Bush for being inflexible, not following the advice of the generals and having no strategy in Iraq -- never mind that they've never had so much as a paper-napkin sketch of a clue as to what to do in Iraq or the War on Terror? Yet, when he took decisive action that can fairly be said to have addressed all of these criticisms, they reflexively opposed him again, proving once...

Speaking to veterans assembled in Kansas City last week, President Bush compared the Iraq war with the Vietnam war, something the loopy left has been doing since before coalition forces invaded in 2003. His thrust differed entirely from the quagmirists, but that didn't stop The Hartford Courant from giving it to him in stereo on Sunday. The first to go off on him was "columnist" Bill Curry, whose ties to the communist Vietnamese government are at least two decades old and whose anti-Americanism goes back to the communist-backed nuclear-freeze movement of the 1970s. Loaded with the talking points of the...

As the cliché goes, "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality." Like most clichés, this one exposes a larger truth. Namely, people often base their views on their fantasies of how the world should be, rather than on the reality of how the world actually is. Following this line, the September 11, 2001 attacks can be seen as a large-scale mugging. After the attacks, the same American people that had ignored the threat of totalitarian Islam since the Iranian revolution first categorized the US as the Great Satan back in 1979, acknowledged the danger and recognized...

It is not just in Iraq that the political left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise. The old advertising slogan, "Progress is our most important product," has never applied to the left. Whether it is successful black schools in the U.S. or Third World countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest. Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves "progressives." What arouses them are denunciations...

OTTAWA — It's a threat that has left-wing Canadian nationalists and right-wing U.S. congressmen in rare and dismayed agreement: a freeway, four football fields wide, stretching from Mexico to northern Manitoba. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum say the corridor - dubbed the NAFTA superhighway - is a primary goal of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America established two years ago by the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico. At separate press conferences in Ottawa yesterday, the road was held out as an example of the potentially repugnant effects of the trilateral partnership....

It is not just in Iraq that the political Left has an investment in failure. Domestically as well as internationally, the Left has long had a vested interest in poverty and social malaise. The old advertising slogan, “Progress is our most important product,” has never applied to the Left. Whether it is successful black schools in the United States or third-world countries where millions of people have been rising out of poverty in recent years, the left has shown little interest. Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves “progressives.” What arouses them are denunciations...

I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of the world. Which is probably all the proof anyone needs to prove that I’m certifiably loony. Even though I know that one of the most obvious symptoms of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again in the foolish belief that the end result will be different this time, I can’t help myself. For instance, a question that constantly plagues me is: why are there still people who long to see Communism prevail? Even back in the 1930s, when America was suffering through the...

Does anyone wonder where the Tom Hayden-Jane Fonda SDS radicals went? The ones who chanted “Hey, hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today?” and cheered on the Communists in Vietnam, and went into the streets to demand America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and became suddenly silent when our troops were pulled and the Communists proceeded to slaughter two-and-a half million Cambodians and Vietnamese? Well today they are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, calling for a capitulation in the war in Iraq and referring to George Bush as Hitler, or perhaps merely suggesting that his mentality is...

"Everything must be different!" or "Alles muss anders sein!" was a slogan of the Nazi Party.  It is also the heart's desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it's true. Hitler and his criminal gang hated the rich, the capitalists, the Jews, the Christian Churches, and "the System". They went through their Leftist phase early in life, and then went on to discover Aryan racial purity as their beau ideal. (As a swarthy Italian, Mussolini preferred to appeal to ancient Roman imperial glory). Nazism...

Three years ago things looked bleak for the Democratic Party. George Bush had just won a second term while his party consolidated its grip on Congress. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay crowed about a "permanent Republican majority," and Beltway Democrats acquiesced as Republicans built their unchallenged (and lawless) unitary executive. Democrats appeared to be on the run, disorganized and demoralized. But outside of Washington there was hope. Grass-roots Democratic activists had seen the future of our politics in Howard Dean -- plain-spoken and unapologetic. His presidential candidacy had come up short, but its fresh, optimistic approach -- predicated on offering...

Led by Democrats since the start of this year, Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower than Republicans scored last year. The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted the money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement was to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wiretapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make...

<...snip...> ... do you think the Democratic Left really wishes us to lose in Iraq? ......I think the answers are something like the following. The liberal Democratic leadership believes that Iraq can fail, thereby repudiating the Bush doctrine and the current war on terror, discrediting conservative candidates at large, teaching the American people about the limits of empire and foreign adventurism, restoring humility to foreign policy, ushering in a Democratic renaissance under which higher taxes, more entitlements, and greater government intervention promote egalitarianism and "correct" the past mistakes of the unenlightened electorate—and do so without serious or lasting harm to...

While the Left pursues environmentalism to advance its global agenda, conservation is best entrusted to local stewardship.Conservatism is about preserving intrinsically valuable things—economic capital, social capital, and natural capital. I use the word “capital� deliberately, for its opponents say that conservatism is nothing but the apologetics of capitalism. That is absolutely right—provided you understand that capital embraces many things that are not translatable into economic terms.So why have conservatives been so slow to capture the environmental cause and the agenda that has been built around it? And why have their opponents been so eager to prevent them? First, the damage...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Why can't the left get any respect? Whenever you use the word "left" in American politics, you feel almost compelled to add quotation marks. Today's left is not talking about nationalizing industry, abolishing capitalism or destroying the rich. What passes for "left" in American politics is quite moderate by historical standards. Still, cliches die hard, so you hear such 20-year-old questions as: "Are Democrats moving too far to the left?" or "Will Democrats abandon the center?" This approach is about abstractions, not concrete political problems, and it misses the dynamic in American public life, which is the...

Jerry Falwell's funeral is today, and now that he is being laid to rest, it is appropriate to dissect the vicious treatment he has received at the hands of his enemies since his unexpected demise. We might have guessed that Jerry Falwell's death would be the occasion for a nice little corpse-kicking spree, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant to witness. The San Francisco gays held an "anti-memorial" in light of Falwell's adamant opposition to gay rights (though Falwell was on record in his support for basic civil rights for gays). The posts at Democratic Underground and Kos were...

At this year's graduation celebration at The New School in New York, Iranian lawyer, human-rights activist and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi delivered our commencement address. This brave woman, who has been imprisoned for her criticism of the Iranian government, had many good and wise things to say to our graduates, which earned their applause. But one applause line troubled me. Ms. Ebadi said: "democracy cannot be imposed with military force." What troubled me about this statement -- a commonly heard criticism of U.S. involvement in Iraq -- is that those who say such things seem to forget the good U.S....

Left-wing religious officials raced to exploit the Virginia Tech murders by resuscitating their favorite slogans about gun control. Winning the tackiness contest, National Council of Churches chief Bob Edgar issued a news release within hours of the shootings. “How many more will have to die before we say enough is enough?” Edgar asked. “How many more senseless deaths will have to be counted before we enact meaningful firearms control in this country? How many more of our pastors, rabbis and imams will have to preside over caskets of innocent victims of gun violence because a nation refused to stop the...

Much of the world now believes that the United States is a force for evil. Hugo Chavez: George Bush is "the devil". Harry Belafonte: Bush is "the greatest terrorist in the world". Nelson Mandela:  U.S. is "a threat to world peace". Ann Wright (retired U.S. Army colonel and State Dept. official, now anti-war activist):  "We are the cause of violence in Iraq.  The violence will continue as long as we're there." William Blum (author of Rogue State, and quoted by Osama bin Laden): "If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few...

The antiwar left -- especially those in the mainstream media and Congress -- always try to mask their intent to cut and run from Iraq by pretending to “support the troops�, whatever that means. But the increasingly visceral debate about Iraq, ever accelerating from the vote to use military force in Iraq to the “non-binding� resolutions now being debated on Capitol Hill doesn’t affect most Americans. But, then again, most Americans aren’t on the front lines getting shot at. The lefties’ assault on the president may leave him weaker politically. But it leaves our troops wondering. Circumstances have not improved...